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The
thing about a collected poems that spans fifty-five years is that a kind of
development can be witnessed. Nick Totton's Press When Illuminated takes
in ten previous publications. The progression of this book sees Totton's
unmistakable stamp
transforming and developing, manifesting itself in various different ways.
It's rather like observing multiple personalities as they grow up. I confess
to knowing very little about Totton when I came to review this book, but was
intrigued to learn that he works as a psychotherapist and has been involved
in the publication of several psychoanalytic books. His preoccupation with
psychoanalysis is evident in his poetry; its tensions and forbidden violence
are voiced and worked through. In 'Biting Through', written in the
mid-seventies, Totton dramatizes a kind of violent incorporation fantasy,
bringing in the inextricable orality of consumption and language:
spoons
will deliver
this
delicacy
we
are
as
we devour spoons, wolfing
meat
and metal, greed, greed
not
for nourishment but accumulation of
weight
gravity
against
endless space of dream:
the
scarcity economy of food-breath-speech can
only
end in tears Ð
And so it goes – psychoanalytic theory fleshed out. There are nuances of the
veiled violence of childhood: fairytale evoked by 'wolfing'. The notion of
loss at the child's entry into language begins to gather momentum, the
insatiable desires necessitated by that loss find their 'weight', their
'gravity', at the centre of the poem. I admire the tripping, oozy cadence
this poem musters, I love some of its word combinations, particularly 'spoons
will devour/this delicacy'. But I cannot help but feel I'm at the dinner
party from hell, with Freud and Lacan and a plate of offal. Perhaps that's
the intention, but like some of the other pieces in here, it's all a little
too knowing, closing off its imaginative possibilities. The psychoanalysis
is, so to speak, being rammed down our throats. This poem illustrated what
I both loved and hated about the collection – and don't get me wrong, I loved
more that I hated – I'm a good patient.
Not only is Totton's ability
to animate language often breathtaking, he has a wonderful, tongue-in-cheek
sense of humour, which saves some of the
pieces I would otherwise have
disliked. The poem above is one such piece. It concludes:
bit
off the whole arm right to the shoulder
vomit
it out
c'mon.
The 'c'mon' is a great touch. It created for me a kind of hilarious, hippy
finality. I felt compelled to give it the peace-sign.
My favourite piece in the collection is the 'Buddha Poems', which comprises
three stanzas of prose poetry. Totton doesn't use this style often, but I
think it suits the moving, funny aspects of his work. I smiled out loud at
his deceptively simple characterization of the Buddha, who, amongst other
activities, appears on t.v. and
hardly recognises himself. Who is this presenter, anyway, and what is his
angle? He hope they are going to focus on issues, not personalities.
'Buddha in the Kitchen' presents a wry, clever take on the philosophy of the
self, but manages to wear its thinking so lightly that the reader is both
delighted and provoked into thought:
The Buddha's favourite snack is cheese on toast. Cheese, chutney, butter,
bread – mmm! Sometimes, however, he finds he has no chutney. Sometimes no
butter. Sometimes no bread. Sometimes no cheese. Take away all the
ingredients, and what's left? – Oh, please, says the Buddha; that's just
ridiculous!
I'm hopeful that, like the Buddha, Totton takes his own philosophies with a
hefty pinch of salt.
Read Totton for his long sequences with their cryptic, deeply personal
messages. In 'This Song is Dedicated to the One Eye Love' he is 'surrounded
by/faulty memories/like unrequited ghosts – all wanting me to speak for
them.'
Read him for the psychology, the preoccupation with a search for the self,
which, when it works, works beautifully, as in 'There's Always a Little Bit
Left in the Marmite Jar' which concludes 'now watch this space/which you will
shortly occupy.'
Try not to find, like me, that 'Your nonsense messages ascend, predictions
/ of expanded human time: a choice / that feeds silently into the lean
identity/extenuated by sorrow' ('Bones of the Face and their Articulations')
is just all too much and in the end only effaces itself, becomes hollow.
There is nothing from the heart in these sentences. And I feel certain that
Nick Totton has an expansive, warm heart because I can see it in his quest
to understand the narratives we invent for ourselves, in lines like 'There
isn't
a word for what I want from you'. And that's just it: Totton knows that the
inadequacy of language is a condition of the self. When he paradoxically uses
that very language to describe the predicament, he is at his best, as in 'Not
a Theory of Poetry':
If
I was a proper poet
my
poems would be implicit by my actions
In
my life
shining
through my life
luminous
bones shaping the casual flesh.
When the language struggles in tension with its own inadequacy, when it
illuminates its flaws for us, it is at its most likable. When it attempts to
tell us what it is doing, it loses that quality. I'll let Totton have the
last word on that:
you
don't need a shaman
to
tell you how the tune goes.
©
Abi Curtis 2004
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